sarah eve kelly

Can you love a person whose beliefs are abhorrent to you?

The first thing a freshman historian is warned against is something called the Grand Narrative, sometimes called ‘Whig history’: the idea that history has served no purpose but to lead us to now, the grand apex of evolution. The past, we are told, should be judged within the context of the past, uncoloured by present-day knowledge, understanding, values, or experience. To judge the past in the context of today is called being ‘present-centred’, and it is Very Bad.

It’s difficult to put ourselves and our own worlds aside to understand history as objectively as possible, but we get the knack of it eventually. It poses a bigger problem in fiction. For a reader to truly engage in (for example) a novel, there must be a character to whom we can hitch our wagons - someone we feel sympathy or empathy for, someone we admire, someone whose fate we invest in. This is only a general rule, not an absolute one - plenty of novels reflect ideas instead of characters, and others read like a slow-motion car crash: every character is detestable, but you can’t take your eyes away. Still, though: the swiftest route to home base is with a sympathetic main character, and the easiest way to make a character sympathetic is for that character to share the reader’s values.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men lately. Yes, I know, I’m coming late to the party. I always do: it means I can go on binges and watch an entire season in three days. And Mad Men got me thinking about values. Its critical acclaim has been almost universal: a gritty, unsparing look at the corporate world of the 1960s. As far as I know there’s only one really loud guy speaking out against it, and that’s Mark Greif in the London Review of Books. Of Mad Men he has this to say:

I suppose it does at least expose what’s most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged.

I have to say I like the show. It’s engaging in that chocolate box, ‘just-one-more-and-then-I’ll-go-to-bed’ kind of way. But because I agree completely with Greif, I’m trying to figure out why I like it.

Admittedly it’s tough not to be present-centred about the 1960s, a decade that suffers from a mountain of misinterpretation owing to the patina that the US poured all over the American Family after the Second World War. The people who thought they were conservative weren’t, in fact, conservative at all: the suburb was a very new thing, and a wife being stuck there was a very new place for her to be stuck. In this particular decade, though, it’s true that there was one generation trying to keep the world in 1952, and another generation - my parents’ generation - standing upside down in a corner on LSD, representing the kind of anarchic change that would destabilise and eventually alter the world.

So how do you make the 1952 guys the good guys? Why are we watching this show? On some level, of course, it’s because we’re mesmerised - in the second episode Paul Kinsey tells Peggy Olson that copywriters’ desks are furthest from the elevators ’so we can’t sneak out’, and I’m left wondering, with Scotch and cigarettes right at your desk, why you’d ever want to sneak out. It speaks (on one level, anyway) to a kind of permissive society that feels about as realistic to me as the underwater world in The Little Mermaid. I’ve certainly never been there.

(There is a post, by the way, to be written about how cigarettes have become a historical tag. Show where, what, and how often people were smoking, and I could probably tell you which decade you’re talking about.)

In a way, though, it’s like watching reality television: gazing into someone else’s office or living room and being able to feel smug. We’re more civilised than that; we’re more enlightened than that. It’s present-centred: the show invites us to view these lives from the point of view of our own lives in a way that The Tudors avoids by a country mile. There is something about the recent past that makes us long to believe that progress has been made, or what we call progress, because the very concept of progress is newer than you think. Greif is right when he says the smugness we feel is unearned. Being a woman in the workplace, for example, is still a tax - it’s just an invisible one now, like VAT. Tot up the numbers and you’ll see how little women are still being paid, and it’s remarkable how few women today are aware of that.

Anyway. Off the point.

Do you watch this show? Do you like the characters? Is there one you’ve hitched your wagon to? Or are they, as Greif asserts, a ‘toybox of tin stereotypes’? For my own part, I haven’t found one that I’m really able to like (always excepting Joan, of course, but she’s not in the show nearly enough) - the overwhelming feeling is one of pity. The wives are trapped, but so too are the husbands; the junior execs are trapped, but so too are the seniors. There is a constant undercurrent of being trapped, and that is present-centred. It’s not possible that everyone was that miserable in postwar middle America; if they were, they wouldn’t have been trying so hard to keep it exactly the way it was.

The setting of the more distant past seems, on some level, to sidestep this fascination with how They are not like Us. There are the little things - we’re tickled by the idea of women using white lead in their makeup in the same way we’re tickled by seeing secretaries smoking at their desks - but by and large, in the world of historical drama (as opposed to history), we’re able to take these characters and their worlds on their own terms. Or is that true? We cheer on the women in the past who jump out of their moulds (there is a reason that Anne Boleyn has been done and done again and can never be done enough: everybody loves her, or loves to hate her), and we scowl at the ones who say anything of duty or restraint. We want to hear all about the wife’s petty rebellions, and we don’t pause to consider that the sisterhood, such as it was, did not self-identify as oppressed until the eighteenth century or better - and certainly didn’t do it with any kind of consensus until the turn of the twentieth century. This wasn’t because they were betraying themselves, or because they didn’t believe in themselves. It was because they didn’t share our values. How could they? They didn’t live in our world. They had vocation, and more often than not (believe it or not) took pride in it. They were three-dimensional human beings, and we don’t realise that by only liking the mould-cracking ones - by feeling pity or contempt for the ones who lived according to the values and traditions of their own time and place - we do them a disservice, and offer them staggering disrespect.

Hilary Mantel speaks of hitching the camera of a story onto the shoulder of one character: it is through that character’s lens that you see the world while you’re reading (or watching). It is the author’s job to make you comfortable enough in that world that you stop thinking like yourself for a little while and start thinking like that person. More often than not we ascribe bigotry or ignorance to the behaviour of historical figures - the best we can say for them is that they didn’t know any better. Is it possible to step off our plinths and truly understand them, or are the best-loved historical novels always going to be about the people in the past who thought most like us?

I ask because I don’t know. I think it would be a tremendously difficult exercise to make any main character of mine pro-life or pro-eugenics or anti-Semitic or any of those things while still making readers love her. It would mean first loving her myself, and I think I could probably do that if I were more of an artist and less a creature of my own time and circumstance. This isn’t a rant; I don’t really have a point of view here. But I still wonder why I want to watch more of Mad Men - who am I invested in? Do I want them to learn something? Do I want to feel superior? Maybe I want to see what things might have been like for my grandmother - who knows. Until the show can make me root for someone (regardless of his or her values), I can’t help thinking it hasn’t done its job.

But now guess what I’m off to do. It’s been a harrowing day, readers, a harrowing day. I spent seven and a half hours fixing my computer (which is to say I yelled at it and pointed threatening cigarettes at it), and even now I’m not sure if it’s OK, and bloody hell, it’s hard to type with your fingers crossed.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Related posts:

1. storytelling
2. corners